I base this essay on Kant's “Analytic of the Beautiful,” the first part of his Critique of Judgment. In the introduction to the Critique of Judgment, Kant outlines the three basic properties of the beauty experience in a sentence whose twists and turns, and mirror-like inversions, are a masterpiece of hiding something in plain sight:

That object the form of which (not the material aspect of its representation, as sensation) in mere reflection on it (without any intention of acquiring a concept from it) is judged as the ground of a pleasure in the representation of such an object—with its representation this pleasure is also judged to be necessarily combined, consequently not merely for the subject who apprehends this form but for everyone who judges at all. The object is then called beautiful.

In this sentence is the key to the threefold Kantian theory of beauty. It is nonconceptual: when I try to isolate what is beautiful either in the object or in my experience of it, I can't grasp it. First, beauty gives me the feel of thinking, in a paradoxical membrane between what Kant calls pure reason and what he calls practical reason. This feel is not directed at a particular object of thought, but is rather directed by thought at itself, in a loop that Kant here calls “mere reflection.” Secondly, beauty is virtual. It is as if the feel of thinking reveals something in the object itself, as if I were magically capable of grasping the ungraspable thing-in-itself, what in the thing is distinctly itself, not its data, its phenomena. I see a duck: the duck's wings and feet are not the duck, yet they are part of the duck. I can't grasp the duck as such. But in the beauty experience, it is as if I am able to touch the unicity of a thing itself, by analogy with the way I can feel thinking, or reason, as an indivisible quantum. Secondly, the beauty experience is universalizable—be careful to see the “izable” suffix here, because it means that this universality is non-coercive. I feel like putting speakers on the Empire State Building so that everyone can hear this beautiful tune. But I shan't, because the coercion would ruin the beauty experience. In this respect, beauty vividly shows me the rush of cognition, and the nonviolence of democracy (pure and practical reason), in a strange mixture.

An analogy might be love. When I love someone, it is as if I have always loved them, that they were destined for me, from beginningless time. I feel this vividly even though I know very well that we just met last Thursday. It is as if cognition doesn't spoil beauty. I can know everything about the historical, social, economic and ecological (and geological, even) context of a poem—and it's still beautiful. Contextualization doesn't destroy it, despite the intentions of some forms of contextualism, which are to demystify beauty. The mystery remains, indestructible.

Moreover, the beauty experience is an attunement (German, Stimmung). The beauty experience tunes up my cognition and my feeling of freedom.

But what is Kant hiding? Kant is hiding how, in order for this experience to happen, there is always already an object, not related to me at all, an object that doesn't depend on my transcendental subjective ability to turn on the lights and see it, or think it. This object is emanating a force field that holds me in its tractor beam. The object tunes me. My cognitive tune-up is possible because there is already a tractor beam, described by some philosophy as givenness.

The object compels me, just this object, this painting. This object is positively tricksterish, as in the culture of a Paleolithic human, insofar as it is vivid and real yet ungraspable. Its appearance is itself, and not itself, at the very same time. It is as if Kant, the gatekeeper of modernity, one of the thinkers who allows humans to do anything to anything because things are just mirrors of (human) thought and desire—the Kant whom Lacan pairs with the Marqus de Sade—has somehow discovered a tiny place in the human universe that is decidedly shamanic.

Why? Because Kant was obsessed with mesmerism, animal magnetism: the idea that objects emanate energy fields, whether they are living or non-living. The bowdlerized child of mesmerism is hypnotism and telepathy. The bowdlerized child of this bowdlerization is the Freudian psyche. Freud himself was also fascinated by the paranormal, a physical yet “impossible” realm, impossible if all there can be is only (gross) body and (pure) mind. But the very experience of beauty shows me that there is at least a membrane between body and mind, a membrane that some cultures (Chinese, Indian, Tibetan and so on) are happy to call the subtle body. This kind of body is in me but it isn't me, yet it has sensations, moods, feelings. It is accessed in yoga, in “spiritual” or religious experiences that are idealized or demonized (or just plain old taboo), and in the “paranormal.” This paranormal—the experience of a non-agricultural human—is what is discovered at the very start of modernity with its eventual global warming and mass extinction. Discovered, and repressed, hidden away at birth.

Thursday, October 30, 2014

People are usually very nervous about fully experiencing the bright and colorful world. Nobody can see this level of relative truth without having cut through all the aspects of ego, because there is still a little attachment. People may see blue as blue, but at the same time, they use that to reinforce their idea of how blue affects their state of mind. Whether they regard things as powerful, good, nice, or threatening, there are always psychological implications behind the colors, forms, noises, and physical sensations they perceive. There is always some implication behind the whole thing. So the relative truth, is very difficult to experience fully, although it is very ordinary. --Trungpa Rinpoche

Other scholars tune in to the fact that species is not metaphysically present at all, but rather an uncanny awareness that despite my conscious intentions and my tiny meaningless actions, I am part of a zombie that just functions (at least at this point) according to long established algorithmic procedures.

The current ecological crisis (maybe “crisis” is far too
limited a term) means that humans are undergoing an upgrade in how they think
and feel about nonhuman beings. An upgrade, whether they like it or not, and
whether they are aware of it or not: even Rush Limbaugh needs to wear
sunscreen.

The crisis in ecological awareness is thus also a crisis in philosophy.
For the last two hundred years, a very interesting movement and
counter-movement has evolved within philosophy. This dynamic is about how we
allow lifeforms into thought, into our ethical and political concern, and into
social space.

Furthermore, it's quite clear that we live in a set of
overlapping, often contradictory, philosophies embodied in fields, food,
energy, the way we talk to cats, how we make art and what we do (or don't do)
about toilets, meat, and ice (and so on). These embodied philosophies make up a
12 000-year pattern.

Outcomes:

This class will complicate and clarify your ability to engage
with nonhuman beings.

You will improve your ability to think and reflect, and
allow yourself to be wrong, or puzzled, or curious.

You will understand a living tradition that deeply affects
the biosphere, of which theory is a somewhat narrow bandwidth. And make ideas about what to do
about it.

I get the article's main point about depression, biospheric depression. I suffer from depression, I get it.

Depression is a freakin trap, ladies and gentlemen.

Just ask someone who suffers from clinical depression, for reals.

You shouldn't put that on other people by shouting FUCK.

The trouble is, scientists, you are indeed pushing dogma here. Sorry, but you are. It's not because of the science, but because of the attitude (scientism). The anti-global warming public sees the threat. Sorry, but it's true. You are trying to force them to change their belief.

The mixture of “We're not sure, this is just statistics, 95% accurate etc” plus scientistic table thumping, now with FUCK to add to the mix, is a killer.

Just ask anyone who knows anything about art. Anyone.

The point is to amaze people. To assume you're right. To speak from a warrior position of total outrageous confidence. You don't need to say FUCK. You just need to blow people's mind.

It's only tricky if you need to find the inspiration. But it's coming from a place of devotion and passion, not aggression.

The Intra-Planetary Concerned Critters abide by the following rules, when they hold press conferences in tandem with the official IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The initial tasks for the IPCC will be a series of press conferences, just like the IPCC hold. At these press conferences, possibly held in the lobbies of the places where the IPCC is holding theirs, the following will be the case: Anyone can be on the IPCC panel. Philosophers, artists, scientists, normal people, anyone. There can be many IPCCs. Members of the IPCC wear animal hats. The human face should be visible and audible but other lifeforms should be present in some way. The sillier the hat, the better. The Council of All Beings is a Deep Ecology practice created by Joanna Macy. One makes an animal mask and speaks to the other animal mask wearers about the pain of the planet. This is very moving but it's preaching to the choir. And it needs a bit of humor. Enough with the apocalypse already! Okay, so here are the rules I've been drawing up. Feel free to discuss and modify them here.

1. Keep it as gentle as possible. That doesn't mean you can't be outrageous. On a meek platform, be perky, outrageous and inscrutable. Aggression and shouting facts won't work and will deplete your mojo.

2. The main thing is to amaze, bedazzle and otherwise be miraculous.

3. Don't argue. You are not trying to persuade people, you are trying to instill a sense of wonderment, laughter, surprise and compassion.

4. Comedy is deeper than tragedy. You can be tragic but within a more profound comic frame. Don't fan the flames of doom!

5. You are not trying to stop the end of the world. It has already ended. Instead, work with the surprise, uncanniness and ultimately relief that "we are already dead."

6. Try to speak as your chosen lifeform as much as you can but you can always break out of role. This is silly, confusing and fun.

7. Be a trickster.

Your view: we never left the Paleolithic, as human bodies and as anxious beings who can be scared and paranoid and hysterical with laughter. This there is no need to return anywhere or progress into the future. All we have to do is notice where we are really at.

8. If someone in the audience challenges you don't fight them. Join them. Admit as much as you can the silliness of the situation and agree with their ridicule.

So, Slavoj Žižek is having a go at the new materialists, and I'm being banned from cultural Marxist journals because I say words like “species” like Dipesh Chakrabarty, with whom I moan a bit about this state of affairs. Thanks for noticing at least!

“Many of these new materialists are my friends,” as Treebeard says. Poor Jane!

The replacement for the bad bad speculative stuff, as we learn from the official organ of cultural critique, is dialectical materialism. Who knew? What an incredible surprise.

Cultural Marxism, as the Critical Inquiry take shows, sees the danger. The threat. It takes us seriously enough to say like Bush “if you're not with us, you're against us.” If you're a speculative realist, you must be an anti-feminist, racist, worker-hating colonialist who wants to reject the last forty years of new left status quo, I mean scholarship.

Grow up chaps!

Dialectical materialism boils down to an ontology you can express in this sentence:

Reality is determined by human economic relations

So, here's my thing about that, from my talk in Norway and my upcoming one at Northwestern.

We were expecting, perhaps, that
once we could see on a much larger scale, things would become much easier to
understand. Indeed, we might criticize those who tried to think at larger
scales for being simplistic. We might even argue that they were deluded.
Particularly if we had quite a bad case of the anthropocentric blues. We might
accuse someone, if we were a certain kind of Marxist, of being a bit of a
hippie for talking at scales bigger or otherwise beyond the human. The hippie
is ideologically deluded into saying things exist outside of social ideological
mediation based on the state of the forces of production. In short, all that we are the world stuff and save Earth stuff is bourgeois pabulum
meant to keep us docile.

Why does our Marxist have this
allergic reaction? Because he is rigidly adhering to a solution to the Kantian
shock—the shock that there are things, but that when we look for them, we only
find human flavored thing data. We never see the actual raindrop, we have
raindrop feelings, raindrop thoughts, raindrop perceptions. Kant himself tries
to contain the explosion by saying that there is a top-level way of
understanding the raindrop, namely mathematizing it via a concept of extension
as the bedrock of what a thing is. Post-Kantians contain the explosion two
ways. Either they reduce everything to matter and ignore the implications of
modern philosophy and the science derived from it. Or they wish away the gap
between phenomenon and thing by claiming more strongly than Kant that some kind
of Decider, goo goo ga joob, makes the thing real. So all these powerful
substitutes for the Kantian subject arise. Geist (Hegel), will (Schopenhauer),
will to power (Nietzsche), Dasein (Heidegger—and we all know German Dasein is
the best best Decider of all).

And in the case of Marx, human economic relations. Human economic
relations make things real. And in the hardcore Hegelian Lacanian Althusserian
version, these relations are an in-the-last-instance
that determine everything else like the sucker of a giant and sprawling
undersea creature, attached to a rock in one place, but attached really
strongly, incapable of being peeled off that rock. So that for the cultural
Marxist, unconsciously retweeting a substance–accidents model of things, there
is ideology (accidents) and human economic relations (substance).

Of course putting it this way I
have already committed a horrible sin, because I've said the word human. By saying that word, I have
implied that there might be a world or worlds beyond or different than the
human, which is as good as saying that there are such worlds. I have touched
the third rail. I have implied Marxism doesn't explain everything, because
there are cats, coral and galaxies. The very concept ecology, coined by Ernst Haeckel, was a way to say the economy of nature in a compact way.
The economy of nature. Economic relations that include nonhumans. Highly
suspicious.

Thursday, October 16, 2014

In Kirkenes, Norway. My heart was so full that it was almost impossible to get the words out. I lost it pretty badly afterwards; luckily that is not on the recording : ) Featuring Timothy Morton, Arie Altena, Britt Kramvig, Nik Gaffney, and Espen Sommer Eide.

Fish make all kinds of sound, and we don't know about that as a rule. Jana Winderen was one of the speakers at Dark Ecology up in Russia. She talked about how her work led to greater care for coral reefs in the Caribbean.

Interesting. We've all seen gorgeous photos of coral. But hearing the fish and so on making sounds actually clinched it when it came to caring for the lifeforms there.

I wonder why. One could perhaps say unwarranted things about sound being immediate and visual things not being, and all the usual cliches. Or perhaps there is a more vivid link for us right now between listening and caring.

Or simply that the voices of fish prevent us from seeing them simply as objects of a sadistic gaze (gaze not being the same as visuality nota bene).

The fact that they call to one another, without us, despite us. I remember the impact of Songs of the Humpback Whale in the 1970s.

That by hearing via underwater microphones rather than seeing, we realize that the biosphere is lit up whether or not we open the refrigerator door.

One thing that happened up here is that Raviv developed and performed a piece who magnitude in every sense blows the lid off of modernity to allow us to hear the abyssal roar of context within and beyond and behind it, a swirl of mountains, quakes, oceans, war and air.

The percussive blast of the opening of the age of asymmetry. (See Hyperobjects for a definition.)

Raviv and I are sitting in adjoining rows on the plane getting the basic thought structure on this mapped out. Exhilarating as colossal crinkles of Norway pass thousands of feet beneath.

Maybe Konstantin the photographer here at Dark Ecology said it best just now. Everything is so much he feels like a camera with a permanently open aperture.

The music workshops are beginning today and 35 of us are departing.

My heart is so full I don't know what to say. Imagine having a four year project named after your work. Then imagine showing up at the conference that sets the tone for that project. To talk about how to proceed.

Thursday, October 9, 2014

Linda Beate Randal is the mayor of this region. She was at the Sonic Acts dinner last night--a very nice one too.

I'm beginning to like mayors. Of course I only know two of them: Linda and Jón Gnarr.

Check this out. Linda presented flowers to one of the organization team, and in her speech she quoted my stuff. And she discussed it. I mean how extraordinary is that? And honoring?

She was down with the idea that ecology is about intimacy. As a farmer she had a lot of experience of that. And as the mayor of a place right on the Russian border, bonds with humans trumped political lines. People rely on one another.

In other news, the vastness of the fjord system up here. I can't describe it yet.

Friday, October 3, 2014

This song is about as silly as my record collection. You have to like Joey Negro, right? Anyway, the whole thing has a rather pleasant 1991 kind of feeling to it. Maybe it's the flute. Or those chords. Or the slightly bitonal quality. Whatever. What the dude is saying is a pretty accurate description of how it's gone for me. My mum just sent over a few hundred that were languishing in storage somewhere in London!

Thursday, October 2, 2014

Beyond Sexism, Racism, Speciesism, We Are All the Same

I Wrote a Book with Björk

“A magical booklet of emails between Björk and philosopher Timothy Morton is a wild, wonderful conversation full of epiphanies and sympathies, incorporating Michael Jackson, daft goths and the vibration of subatomic particles in its dizzying leaps, alive with the thrill of falling in love with someone’s brain.” (Emily Mackay, NME)

New

AND

Timothy Morton

Timothy Morton is the author of Being Ecological (Penguin, 2018), Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (Verso, 2017), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (Columbia, 2016), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (Chicago, 2015), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities, 2013), The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007), eight other books and 200 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food. In 2014 Morton gave the Wellek Lectures in Theory. He is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. Email me

RECENTLY

Comments

You are welcome to comment by leaving your full name or a way to find your full name with one or two clicks, and/or an email address.

Translate

Search the Blog

Follow by Email

Subscribe to EwN

Twitter

Zermelo-Fraenkel Free Zone

“Outstanding.”—Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes

“Dark ecology has the potential to be the punk rock or experimental pop of ecological thinking.”—Kasino A4

“It isn’t [nature] itself that needs trashing — we’re doing a fine job of that already; it’s our way of thinking about it that needs to be structurally realigned ... it's an important book that, in a scant 205 pages of main text ... frames a debate that no doubt will be carried on for years to come.”—Vince Carducci, Pop Matters

“He practices what he theorizes: nothing is wasted in his argumentation.”—Emmanouil Aretoulakis, Synthesis

“Picking up where his most obvious predecessors, Gregory Bateson and Felix Guattari, left off, Morton understands mental ecology as the ground zero of ecological thinking, as that which must be redressed before anything else and above all. Morton goes beyond both his forebears, however, in repairing the rift between science and the humanities, which the Enlightenment opened up and against which Romanticism reacted. Perhaps most pleasantly surprising, given its erudition, is that in its stylistic elegance The Ecological Thought is as satisfying to read as it is necessary to ponder.”—Vince Carducci